What a relief. Now we know Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been visiting the notorious Yasukuni Shrine in a private capacity all along. 

He wasn't making his annual visits as Japan's elected political leader. Now I feel so much better, don't you?

"I pay a visit as a person and not as the duty of the prime minister," Koizumi was quoted as saying at a Japanese House of Councilors' Budget Committee session.

"Junichiro Koizumi, who is prime minister, is paying a visit as an individual," the prime minister reiterated, according to the Kyodo News Service, adding that a visit will occur sometime this year.

And we all thought Koizumi was leading Japan on these visits that, if one reads opinion polls conducted in Tokyo, more Japanese citizens oppose than favor.

Koizumi has paid four such sojourns to the Tokyo-based Yasukuni Shrine since taking office in April 2001. The memorial honors 14 Class-A World War II criminals along with a multitude of Japanese war dead.

Each time the prime minister chooses to go to the site, he outrages much of Asia, especially his Chinese and Korean neighbors who view the visits as having salt rubbed in their wounds. The pilgrimages honor Imperial Army war criminals who were then at the helm of the Japanese forces and oversaw murder, rape and the pillaging of Japan's Asian neighbors during World War II.

Such visits are like a sitting German chancellor annually visiting the bunker where Hitler committed suicide in order to honor the Nazi leadership. The world would not tolerate such an act. So how can this kind of thing happen in Japan?

Koizumi's visits may also violate the Japanese Constitution, which says the state must conduct its activities separately to religious affairs, another reason Koizumi now claims he visits the shrine as a private individual and not as Japan's elected leader.

His last visit occurred on New Year's Day in 2004. Now private citizen Koizumi is contemplating yet another stop at the memorial. We're certain that, after Koizumi's clarification of the real purpose behind his visits, the reporters and photographers who usually tag along with him won't go. Of course, we're joking.

Koizumi stubbornly persists in his efforts to please Japan's right-wingers, men who insist on living like ostriches -- their heads firmly buried in the sand -- trying to make out the past didn't happen the way it did.

"I don't understand why I should stop visiting (the) Yasukuni Shrine," Koizumi told the parliament's Budget Committee. "I will decide appropriately when to go."

Hu Jintao, China's president, and other Chinese leaders have spoken directly to the prime minister and other Japanese leaders on more than one occasion, patiently explaining that the visits are tainting the already strained diplomatic waters between the two Asian nations.

At their most recent dialogue just a few weeks ago, Hu told Koizumi that the past must be seen as a mirror for the future, but Koizumi obviously has done little in the way of reflecting on the Chinese president's words.

While he re-issued an old half-hearted "apology," actions surely speak louder than words. Progress can be made if the Japanese government reconsiders once and for all Japan's wartime aggression, and realizes that anything associated with that shameful history cannot be honored. That includes "private visits" by a sitting Japanese prime minister to a shrine that honors 14 Class-A World War II criminals.

(China Daily May 24, 2005)